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Tinyverse

A game about saving tiny people on tiny planets by moving them between the planets and eventually onto a spaceship.

There are a lot of mechanics that we simply don't have time to implement. Such as, sun radius shrinking, planet and people preferences so only certain people can be moved to certain planets, static planets and orbiting planets to force the player to time their movements. Just to name a few.

We felt this game was screaming to be on a touch screen. The controls would be so much more intuitive on an iPad. Also the action nature of the game is accustom to the app store.

We might revisit this idea as there are so many more places it can go.

Let us know what you think! If you have any suggestions, ideas, or run across any bugs, we are all ears.

Comments

Nice game with an assured graphical style. Would really like to see where you take this, too. Very minor thing: Took me a minute or two to realize rmb meant right mouse button! You may want to clarify.

Simple, but effective idea, could be really improved into something bigger.
The song is really excellent but I hesitate to rate it as five stars since it's not your work... but it's not against jam rules, so I'll rate it anyway (say for picking good tune)

Yeah agreed. Might revisit this someday. lol I didn't actually think about the rules when picking music. I can remove it if necessary. You can rate me low on music if you like I didn't make it so I'm not offended :)

I thought this was overall a strong entry. There were a few mechanical issues that hampered the playability of it but they weren't so bad. Mainly the speed of the camera was too fast, and there was no visual feedback when dragging people to the spaceship so I wasn't sure when it was working or not. A little more complexity with the basics and some polish there and removing some of the unnecessary complexity (shrinking planets I found annoying honestly) and I think this could be very good.

I would like to see that instead of dragging people from each planet, you simply click the planet when in range. Gets so fiddly when trying to drag in two stages for the transfer. Better to get in range and click.

Very good game design:
- good instructions directly on the screen
- not to many instructions (move people from planet to planet: player must find out this)
- interesting concept... don't know similiar games
- different game mechanics within the game: putting planets together for jumping over gaps or rush through multiple sun systems with one planet

Surely a good game on a touchpad. I advise you to make a commercial app with this concept :)

(some sound effects while pushing planets or people or at the end of a level would be nice... for audio feedback. A little feature suggestion: inertia respective moving planets if you stop dragging them)

@demonpants
Thank you! A settings screen with camera speed will definitely be added. Good point about the visual feedback. For a while there was an audio cue but it got really annoying really fast. A less annoying visual cue will be added. Also you got me thinking about the planet shrinking. Its there because we want the game to be a quick, frantic, action game and removing it would make it more of a puzzle game I think.

@Brassawiking
I agree! We had thought about that but for some reason never did it. Definitely need to change that.

@Trylle
Maybe not your game haha :) Frantic is what I want this game to be so in a sense that is a compliment for me even if its not your game.

@Jeremias
:o Thank you! This is only our second LD so that is a huge compliment.
Giving planets weight and inertia would create a very interesting feel to the game, especially on a touchpad! The game is severely lacking in the audio. There is alot that can be added there with audio cues and music. There are still a lot of mechanics that can be added.

Very innovative game. I liked the graphics and music. Unfortunately, I just didn't find all the precision click-and-dragging to be much fun in a video game. That's for office work, which I play video games to escape from :P. Especially not fun was right-click-dragging, which didn't even seem to work every time it should have.

The game could be made more fun by not requiring as much dragging. For instance, if the green line is there, just let the player right click where the players should go. Also, for me, I got a lot more enjoyment out of the levels that felt like a puzzle: Pay attention and figure out the right order to evacuate the people in, then do it. Then there was another kind of level that I didn't like: It's shrinking OMG fast! Go, click, drag, go!!! That's no fun (for me).

@R3ason
Thank you! We were working on a zomming in and out but never got it functioning properly so just scraped it for the zooming down at the beginning of the level. :) If we continue with this idea we will definitely add that.

@Lidfrid
I'm not quite sure what you mean thats its impossible?

@Jedi
Thanks for the feedback. The controls could definitely use some work. Clicking is definitely an option but there are some issues with that. We would classify it as an action puzzle game so we might need to rework some levels to keep that in mind. :)

Way to create a ton of levels! I really liked how you experimented with the various transportation and driving mechanics as well as mouse skill game genre of just even being able to click the planets at all. Quite stressful and fun. I played at least 8 levels if not 10. Not sure how many there were. If there was a level counter I'd probably still be playing but I have to go to bed. :D Fun game though for sure!

Quite good. The music is great and adds tension; the integrated text gets me into the action right away. I found the right-dragging mechanic difficult at first because of the lack of feedback, but once I figured it out it was usually fine. The play mechanic is novel, though it didn't really seem like it led to a large variety of puzzles, so that was one downside. Good all around, though.

This was a neat little game, I had some trouble actually playing it though. The big problem was that right-click-drag is an almost impossible operation on a mac trackpad. I wondered overall if this might have been a more workable game with some alternate ways of doing "interface" (camera, move planet, move people). For example, why do you need to drag the people when moving them? Might a single click suffice and then they go along the one active line? Some of the writing also seemed a little awkward, also.

I really really liked the style though, the thing with diagrams and text naturally overlaid on the game world gave the whole thing a great space-age feel and just the act of rearranging the little universes felt really cool.